New Years

We rang out the old year by going to the fish store to talk to them about ordering a custom tank and stand. When we bought the house part of the plan was to improve the fishtank and it's exciting to finally be past enough of the insulation and water heater type projects that we can start working on this one. We definitely want to go a bit bigger (though certainly not to the swim-in dimensions that Kevin aspires to), but equally important factors are noise reduction and automation (ie, no more buckets stacked everywhere for water changes and water top-off!!). Our designs are now submitted so that we can get a quote. Fun! The fish store also had a great group of Royal Grammas and we brought one home. (Our first fish was a gramma, and we thought he was great. So sad when he didn't make it through the wind storm power outage two years ago.) The timing is great, since we're done with travel for a few months, and after acclimating him for a bit we got him settled in the quarantine tank. He'll stay there for the next month (he's unlikely to be susceptible to parasites, but if he's carrying any we need to give them time to die off before we introduce him to the tang). He's been doing a little bit of exploring, which seems practically sociable compared to the old gramma, but wasn't really visible enough for photos. Perhaps in a few days...

Champagne, etc, to celebrate "New Years in Boston" (aka 9 PM) while we finished getting the new guy settled:



(Kevin's covered in salt residue. You can see a bit of purple in the bottom-left corner of our tank – our new dude!)

Larry came by a little bit later for champagne and to catch up (we haven't seen him in ages).



Everyone looks lively in this photo but Larry was planning to go out and practice his avalanche skills the next day, so he left just after 11. I was asleep 20 minutes later. :-) Such a fun day, but not our rowdiest-ever New Year's celebration?